wildcard function in the Erlang standard library filelib module is a very flexible way to do this. wildcard takes as input a string containing standard UNIX wild card elements (such as the *, ?, or { list-of-alternatives }) and returns a list of file names that satisfy the criteria:
% list all files and directories under /tmp
1> filelib:wildcard("/tmp/*").
["/tmp/.ICE-unix",
"/tmp/.X11-unix",
"/tmp/.font-unix",
"/tmp/test1.erl",
"/tmp/test2.erl",
"/tmp/testB.erl",
"/tmp/testC.erl",
"/tmp/wings.erl"]
You can provide finer-grained control over the results by using some of the list primitives, such as filter or fold, along with various file operations and predicates to only provide results of interest to you:
% list all subdirectories of /tmp
2> lists:filter(fun(X) -> filelib:is_dir(X) end, filelib:wildcard("/tmp/*")).
["/tmp/.ICE-unix",
"/tmp/.X11-unix",
"/tmp/.font-unix",
"/tmp/testC.erl"]
% list all files with extension .erl under /tmp
3> lists:filter(fun(X) -> not filelib:is_dir(X) end,
3> filelib:wildcard("/tmp/*.erl")).
["/tmp/test1.erl","/tmp/test2.erl","/tmp/testB.erl","/tmp/wings.erl"]
% list all files under /tmp that are > 1024 bytes
4> lists:filter(fun(X) -> not filelib:is_dir(X)
4> andalso filelib:file_size(X) > 1024 end,
4> filelib:wildcard("/tmp/*.erl")).
["/tmp/wings.erl"]
The examples given all just act on metadata of the file, there's no reason you can't inspect the contents of the file in the filter function, though that will make the function much slower.
Based on work by GordonWeakliem.
-- BrentAFulgham - 02 Sep 2004
